Gerard Mortier will join the New York City Opera in 2009.
Gerard Mortier, an iconoclastic impresario and one of the opera world’s premier provocateurs, will become general manager and artistic director of the New York City Opera in 2009.
Mr. Mortier, now the director of the much larger and more complex Paris National Opera, has made his mark over a quarter century with sometimes shocking up-to-the-minute productions. He will succeed Paul Kellogg, who leaves in May.
The appointment of such a major international figure is a coup for the No. 2 house in Lincoln Center. It represents a challenge to the behemoth across the plaza, the Metropolitan Opera, where a new general manager, Peter Gelb, has shaken up its hidebound ways.
In a telephone interview from Paris on Tuesday, Mr. Mortier said he would halt the company’s intense effort to find a new home, which included failed attempts to move to ground zero and to a nearby site on Amsterdam Avenue. Instead, the company will stay in the New York State Theater, whose stage was built for ballet, but will travel elsewhere in the city. He said he had recently visited the Apollo Theater, the Hammerstein Ballroom and the Armory.
“I like to work with the things I have,” Mr. Mortier said. But he left open the possibility of a future move.
Susan L. Baker, the opera’s chairman, said Mr. Mortier and his technical advisers had convinced the board that the theater could undergo physical alterations to make it more congenial to opera. “He’s pretty compelling,” she said.
Mr. Mortier also said he would seek collaborations with the New York City Ballet, which also performs at the State Theater and has historically had a tense relationship with the opera; reduce the number of productions; and move toward a “stagione” system, the more typically European arrangement in which one opera is presented at a time.
Most of all, he said he would import his rigorously contemporary sensibility. “The most dangerous thing for opera is to make it something in a museum,” he said. “Even an old piece by Mozart has to tell us something about today. To be modern is to be sensitive to everything that happens around you.”
Mr. Mortier has relentlessly pushed to reconceive opera’s standard works for modern times. His influence, through the directors he has nurtured, has spread throughout Europe, helping make the current age of opera director-centric rather than diva-dominated.
“The New York City Opera has to go into a new direction,” he said. “If you don’t renovate, you disappear.”
He said he would not seek to compete with the Met but would create productions to complement its offerings. “Certainly it’s a challenge for me to work next door to him,” he said of Mr. Gelb, “and for him too.”
Mr. Mortier, 63, will not start in his job full time until September 2009, after his term in Paris ends. He turns 65, the mandatory retirement age there, in November 2008, but was given permission to finish out the season.
For the two seasons before he officially begins at the City Opera, he said, he will spend at least a week every month in New York. The 2007-8 program is already in place, and the following season is partially complete.
Nevertheless, the arrangement leaves the City Opera formally leaderless for two years. Ms. Baker, the company’s chairman, said she would take on a greater administrative role.
And questions remain about Mr. Mortier’s ability to raise money, one of an opera manager’s main jobs in the United States. The Paris opera receives about two-thirds of its funds from the government; the City Opera, barely 3 percent.
Mr. Mortier, who is Belgian and spoke in a rapid, Flemish- and French-accented English, said he would actively pursue donors. He acknowledged a lack of experience in the kind of fund-raising typical here but said he was no novice.
“Raising money with the government is something, too,” he said, and he pointed out that he had modestly increased giving in previous posts. “I believe there is new money in New York that wants to be part of a new vision in opera,” he said. “Maybe I dream.”
The courtship of Mr. Mortier began last spring, Ms. Baker said, when she was seated next to him at a dinner at the French consulate. “We made a real connection,” she said. Talks began in earnest in September.
Mr. Mortier was born in 1943 in Ghent and, despite his French name, is Flemish. He made his mark at the Théâtre de la Monnaie in Brussels, transforming it from an operatic hinterland into a postmodernist temple during his tenure there through the 1980s, although he left large debts behind.
The Salzburg Festival stunned the musical world by hiring him to succeed the hallowed Herbert von Karajan, and Mr. Mortier spent the 1990s there scandalizing many of its tradition-minded, well-heeled opera patrons, the most notorious provocation being a production of Johann Strauss’s “Fledermaus” laced with cocaine and fornication and aimed at Austria’s far-right political forces.
After a stint as founding director of the RuhrTriennale arts festival in Germany, he went to the Paris Opera. A recent production of Mozart’s “Zauberflöte” there caused an uproar with its air-mattress décor, video projections and costumes, including glittering, neon-lit silver jumpsuits and long black wigs adorning the Queen of the Night and her Three Ladies.
Mr. Mortier has been given to incendiary statements: There was no reason for another Wagner “Ring” after Patrice Chéreau’s cycle at Bayreuth. Art is anything but entertainment and unrelated to box office receipts. (In contrast, Mr. Gelb receives daily reports of ticket sales.) In the interview, Mr. Mortier moderated some of those views.
“I do opera not only for entertainment,” he said. “With music you can bring back to the people emotions.” Mr. Mortier is also a master of the artistic bon mot: “If talking is expression of the mind, singing is expression of the soul,” he said in the interview.
He said he was committed to using American singers and promoting American opera, traditionally a part of the City Opera’s mission. He noted that he had taken many American singers to Europe.
The contrast between the Paris and the New York City operas is great. The Paris Opera, which dates to 1669, encompasses two large theaters, a chorus, a 170-member orchestra, a world-class ballet company and 1,600 union-hardened employees. It has a $200 million budget. City Opera’s budget is less than a quarter of that. It has 893 employees and an orchestra of 69 members.
Mr. Mortier said he was drawn by the challenge of renewing the City Opera, the lure of New York and the opportunity to return to an intimate, less bureaucratically encumbered house. He said he had turned down an inquiry from the Vienna State Opera to be considered for the top job there.
“I am very seduced by being with an ensemble where I can get to know everyone,” he said.
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